Article hints at this, but different applications require different approaches to documentation. For applications geared towards "expert" users, well structure

Article hints at this, but different applications require different approaches to documentation. For applications geared towards "expert" users, well structured reference documentation is essential. This is true for programming languages, development frameworks, professional sound/video/image editing tools and some enterprise applications. Users of these applications perform complex tasks and are invested in their tools enough to educate themselves about them in some capacity. Consumer oriented web apps on the other hand should gravitate towards in-context documentation, tool tips, help icons etc. If your users cannot figure out the most common tasks through discovery, you're not going get any adoption. No amount of documentation can change that. Granted, reference documentation can still be very useful in this case, but it's usually better structured as an FAQ or some other troubleshooting/cookbook oriented manner. Succinct documentation still needs to be well written. Please don't let your software engineers write end-user oriented documentation. And I'm saying this as a software engineer myself.